Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm #18
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I visited the occupation of Wall Street late afternoon yesterday, after recording this Freak Storm sermon. What an unusual time we live in. Tropical storms and people storms sweep through the public squares. Climate change and national debt are Devils releasing deadly energy. Leaders in politics seem like ciphers, drained of energy. But Earth defenders are flying, Vendana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, Bill Mckibben – and those kids at Liberty Square.

On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Reverend asks “What happened to peace?”

On that impossible day when the skyline of New York City collapsed on its southern tip – I watched from a rooftop across the East River – we entered an unexpectedly peaceful eye of the storm. We all fell toward the terrible scene. We fell through tunnels, over bridges. We were cultural first responders and many of us ricocheted over to a park called Union Square, the site of so much freedom fighting in the history of the United States.

There, thousands gathered in candle-light vigils on the first nights after 9/11, and this quickly evolved the park into a “people’s republic” without police, with an intense series of sing-alongs, rallies, prayer sessions and circles of traumatized but also liberated citizens, having conversations with strangers, passing the “talking stick” from hand to hand. Around us were copy-shop color reproductions of the faces of the missing, with Magic Marker notes by loved ones, “Hurry home Katherine, Bob and Nancy will wait up for you!”

Candles and flowers were everywhere, and mementos of a personal nature were left in little shrines: feathers and diary pages, old record covers from John and Yoko. Artists set up easels and painted images of firemen with angel-wings. Break-dancers took turns. Monologists shouted in the trees. Fire-swallowers. Mimes dressed up like the Statue of Liberty. Professors studied this unfolding “original culture.”

The vortex of expression continued for weeks and weeks. We stood in circles talking about Peace. We passed the talking stick. We felt Peace was among us, as the missing dead, a parallel world of peaceful smiling friends who died that Tuesday, watched us from every surface. Yes Peace is here, we thought. Something we do here will forgive everyone. A large act of forgiveness is possible – the habit of war can be changed. The bombs haven’t dropped yet.

In the ten years since then, the official violence has been grotesque. Our taxes kill children, with old dead “freedom” rhetoric spoken over the bodies by politicians. At home here in New York City, the 1st Amendment protections that made the Union Square moment possible are strictly hunted down. We have gone to jail for the simple act of shouting or singing in public. Peace – we are told – cannot come from anything but brute force. This infantilizes the citizenry – into consumers only, victims momentarily safe in a culture of fear, in a culture of apocalyptic blockbusters and Tea Party crazies…

This is a very dark time. We can only love and work in a parallel world, in local cultures that we can touch and make sense of. We must carefully select when and how to stand up to an energy company, for instance, that walks into town with bank money and drilling equipment. We do have power from that Union Square world we created.

Believing that the Earth is our god, government, economy and culture – all wrapped into one big institution – that is simple common sense!  When we draw our last breath together, all the functions of living will be mixed together in that one breath.  There won’t be separate powers anymore.

Believing that the Earth is our god, government, economy and culture – all wrapped into one big institution – that is simple common sense!  When we draw our last breath together, all the functions of living will be mixed together in that one breath.  There won’t be separate powers anymore.

Alarmist?  Pessimistic?  Radical?  … are things so bad?

It’s not so bad if you ignore the upheavals and century storms and waves of extinctions.  Most of us haven’t made a decision about what do to.  The climate is changing and we get through another day.

Individuals in the media-saturated west have mostly made the decision to make no decision.  Our god, government, economy and culture – has made the same no-decision.  The biggest institutions are nearly silent on the question of climate change.  It is not an issue in the Presidential politics of the United States – despite 900 tornados this year, and floods, fires and heat-waves of biblical proportions.

The heads of the nation-states do not comment on the fact that the air, and water and even the ground we stand on – are now radically changing.  (Evo Morales, the native-American President of Bolivia is the only one that comes to mind.) And yet, national identity is one thing we cling to.  It is very Tea Party to say, “America is the Greatest Nation!” – but we all go along with it.

Why?  Soon millions of us will be fleeing the coastal cities.  As the sea rises and the waves get bigger, will we first and foremost be national citizens?  No – the first thing will be:  Save our loved ones from drowning, and seek higher ground.  Will each dry hill be its own self-congratulatory country?  Let’s go to the common sense again:  No, things will be a lot more chaotic then that.  It’s more likely that a world with a refugee species won’t be made of nations anymore.

We shouldn’t be made of nations now.  We should be made of what we are really made of – the Earth.  Nations, religions, economies, and cultures should no longer be separate, defensive and competitive.  There is a reason that climate change is not mentioned by the leaders.  We are already experiencing a kind of false drowning – in these many systems of belief that demand our absolute allegiance.  These traditions keep us in our dull inactivity, without access to our own common sense.  This good citizenship will kill us all!

It would be a giant leap for mankind to move forward from these old habits, wouldn’t it?  We keep hoping that a new awareness of the level of emergency will rise out of these old institutions, but we can’t wait anymore.  Now we must listen to our common sense. And that means getting down on our knees and praying to the wind.

Then we rise and receive our instructions from the Earth.  Call our neighbors, call our friends.  Run as fast as we can to a coal-fired power plant and shut it down.

The Christianized Jesus – the turning of a radical into a conservative shadow of his former self – explains our problem of establishing and celebrating freedom fighters today. It is important that our progressive heroes be given a deserved fame, an accurately reported fame. This is crucial in ways that impact our own activism.

Jesus of Nazareth was not a Peak Performance Strategist as the prosperity preachers would have it. Nor was he an foreigner-hating patriot as the Tea Party would argue. Obviously American politicians and their lobbyists pursue so many policies that are against the teachings of Jesus but are supported by mainstream Christian opinion. In fact, Jesus’ parables and sayings push the spiritual revolution of gift economies, and of justice through radical forgiveness.

The Hallmark-carding of Dr. King’s life is what gave Glenn Beck the opening to disrespect his Lincoln Center speech. King’s basic differences with our present corporate economy needs to be a presence in our lives, especially in the educational materials and media of the young. Malcolm X’s spirited defense against the violence of entrenched power – this would help us now, as the security state begins to define 1st Amendment-protected protest as a form of terrorism. Cesar Chavez’s creativity and steady hand in unionizing the California farmworkers could be useful now as state employees face labor busting by governors and their wealthy tax-dodging sponsors. These three progressive heroes must be known for what they actually were.

It was believed that Jesus could be saved from the distortions of right-wing apocalyptic Christianity by researching the historical man. That hasn’t worked, despite the Newsweek (“Jesus – who was he really?”) cover story every Easter. I am writing from the Mayan region of southern Mexico, in the city of Chiapas, where another defense against the predations of the Christianized Jesus has been a success. Here, some of the people subjugated by the brutal conquistadors undermined the Spaniard’s god by concentrating their prayers on San Juan Bautista – John the Baptist.

San Juan stood in the flowing spirit of the River Jordan as he repeated again and again, “I am not He. I am not the One.” The Holy Spirit flowed through him as he baptized new believers in the water. John was in the river, in motion, always becoming. He offered his blessing to the act of belief, the creative power of the individual who approached him. As a result his personality is not so easily used to enforce hardened, violent fundamentalism. The Mayans have outmaneuvered fundamentalism to free themselves from those who rode toward them with the swords of Christ. Chiapas and Chamula, Mexico are far healthier and less consumerized then your average American suburb. This brilliant adjustment on their religion forced on them by the Spanish has a lot to do with it. What the Mayan did to the Spanish God is what we all need to do to the Bank of America.

Better approaches to the figures that we revere (and worship) are needed in this time of permanent war, economic piracy, and most of all the Earth’s crisis. Let’s find ways to be honest about radicals’ lives – so that we have clearer courage for our own activism.

Filmed on the lawn of the Tate Modern museum in London, the newest episode of our video podcast Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm features Reverend Billy preaching to a crowd of activists and on-lookers after performing an exorcism of BP’s oil money sponsorship of the museum’s Miro exhibit. For video and pictures of the exorcism, visit http://revbilly.com/liberate-tate

Exorcism – the act of driving out a dark spirit that has possessed a person or a place, by commanding it to leave in the name of a more powerful power, in our case the life of the Earth – this is one of the oldest of our human rituals.  However, exorcisms are also embedded in the arts of our culture like little noticed but powerful micro-climates.

We want to find a new kind of power to use against the destroyers of life, the coal companies and the Pentagon, the marketers setting the bait for babies, and the Wall Streeters with their damaging false prosperity.   Our protests that look like parodies of 60’s marches –  and I’ve served my country in a hundred of ‘em! – that’s a form of dissent that has “lost its magic.”  The on-line petitions, the “encourage your congressperson!”, – well that’s a pale imitation of the magic of democracy.  Democracy as actual magic?  Example:  When Abraham Lincoln gave his Malice Toward None speech and Frederick Douglas followed him into the White House with his analysis of it.  That political speech is artful magic.

Tim DeChristopher out-bidding the oil companies for pristine southern Utah.  THAT was magic.  He called the auctioneers on their theater, and taught us all how naked the Emperor had become.  His hex-prayer was to just recite higher and higher numbers of imaginary wealth.  Tim declared that he was the richest man in the room.  He imitated their empty power ritual – and then became powerful himself.  His jail time will have its magic too, and we will walk in the land he saved from George Bush’s friends while we wait for him and he waits for us.   What Tim did – you could call it art, or politics, or law, or medicine – all of those words and none of them.  The Earth spoke through him and re-united all those old categories.  The feds want to keep it legal, but his power is deeper than that.

Whole sections of our culture have slid into a kind of provincialism, because they aren’t singing about, poeming about, painting about – the Earth’s crisis.  You can’t be hip ignoring life itself.  The wasteland of the arts is a painful thing for those of us who grew up in that world.  Now serious actual magic – even just the possibility of it – is forgotten.   What we have now is technique and careerism.  Broadway has become the provinces.  It is not primary culture.  Whole theater seasons go by without life of the Earth in the storyline of any play, at a time when the physical life of the Earth is in the throes of dramatic pain.

But the incredible six-months long Miro exhibit at the Tate Modern – with BP money backing it?   Here we have the destruction of meaning.  If the Director of the Tate meets you at a cocktail party and says, “Well mobsters have been financing the arts since the Medicis.”  You tell that guy to look in the window.  The Thames is an oceanic estuary which at high tide is about 4 feet below the edge of the Tate’s lawn.  The Tate has actually hung a climate change exhibit, paid for by fossil fuels money, while the Thames rises in the window.  Doesn’t that being-possessed-by-dark-spirits-is-the-real-world-honey cycle need to be broken by some high-velocity mockery?

Beauty wants to begin again.  We climate change resisters need to go back to when communicating wasn’t separate from life.  Miro has much in his work that is from the Earth, bio-morphic shapes, as if he knows where life comes from.  He is at home with the comedy of fundamental particles.  He could be painting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, that is, before the dark spirits of British Petroleum changed the picture.

At the Tate Modern in London, British Petroleum seeks to capture our imagination by hitching its BP sunflower logo to the Miro exhibit. The artistic experience is then reduced to a dangerously passive consumerism. Only the Earth itself, a kind of freak storm inside, can free us from such a damaging lie. We tried to let all the victimized life of BP come through us on Monday.

At our exorcism of the BP devil (video below), we prayed, screamed, circle-danced, rubbed out the logo as the police mused…. Amen! May the fossil fuel companies find our interruptions are weekly, daily, hourly — as constant as fabulous bad weather!

Sometimes we have to start over or we can’t see the end…

Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm #11
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What is The Church of Earthalujah? http://bit.ly/EarthalujahExplained

In recent days we have challenged the devils in the Deutschbank in Dusseldorf, and the ING and UBS in Amsterdam, and HSBC in Liverpool – laying our hands on the cash machines and calling our demons. What are these exorcisms? Why these muscular hexing prayers at the ATM? Of course the big banks have their famous bad practices – redlining, foreclosures, demolitions of communities. But now with the earth crisis there is a broader deeper big bank attack. In the Church of Earthalujah we have come to believe that big banks distance us from each other. The global storm of capital consumerizes and militarizes us. The force of the money leaves us dispirited and alone, more intimate with products and sentimental patriotism than the people around us…

If we human beings don’t re-ignite a new kind of meeting – don’t meet down in the city square in that crushing crashing way – despite the Spanish Greek Syrian Sri Lankan NYC Liverpool banker’s police. If we don’t physically re-crowd in a way that collapses nation states and corporations and armies in that touching/shouting/marching that we’ve seen from Tunis to Madison. If our uprisings don’t continue to rise and engulf the planet in the good fire – then the official silence that heats the atmosphere more each day will be the quiet time that kills us all.

Most earth scientists, if you speak to them privately and off the record, will confide that it is, in fact, too late. There will be rapid and chaotic changes on the Earth’s surface, and it seems to be in the tectonic plates beneath the surface as much as the polar caps and jet streams and oceans above. Despite this, we can still hope that the Earth might be persuaded to go forward in some kind of collaboration with the human species if it’s convinced by the living it feels from us, as a species, as people. The social animal that we are will have to humanize in an extreme way. We will have to become much more intensely human to escape and make irrelevant or flip over the nationstates, working as they do for the distant banks.

So – thinking of another exorcism in a few hours. I know that there will be that sensation that we’re asking the Earth to come up through us and it might just feel like bad acting delivered in the manner of most bad action – with misguided, hopeful energy. Our script is from earth scientists and native wisdom and radical faeries from the drag parade. And the script keeps changing as between our sweating and shouting one of the singers comes into the room reading from a book by John Berger. I know that one point of these exorcisms is to – just be together in the act of doing it. We’re feeling this as the tour progresses. We are so close together that we ourselves are changing with the effort of willing some kind of forgotten magic that would spiritually hack into the evil. The effort changes us as we make up new songs and leap and push against the bullet-proof edifice of global banking, as we press back against the cash machine’s strange hypnosis.

Earthalujah!

See pictures and video from our exorcisms all across Europe: http://revbilly.com/galleries/europe-exorcism

Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm #10
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As The Church of Earthalujah takes off for our European tour, Reverend Billy gets a lesson in hysterical revolution from British activists and his one-year-old daughter.

Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm #9
Rev. preaches on whittling those 700 issues in your inbox every morning down to just one: saving life itself.

Watch more episodes & subscribe: http://revbilly.com/podcast
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What is The Church of Earthalujah? http://bit.ly/EarthalujahExplained